§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns advertising, such as online advertising for example. In particular, the present invention concerns helping to automatically generate advertisements (“ads”) for Web pages selling products or services, along with an inverted index used to target the serving of these ads, using hypertext content and/or other attributes of the underlying product or service.
§1.2 Background Information
Internet search engines, such as Google for example, support keyword-based online advertising. To advertise on these search engines an advertiser has to provide an ad creative (what is actually rendered or displayed) for their ad, as well as a set of targeting keywords for the ad.
Creating the ad creative and choosing the right set of targeting keywords that will give the maximum return on investment for an advertising budget can be a time consuming process. This is particularly true for e-retailers that have a large number of product offerings, especially if such product offerings fall under different product categories. Consider, for example, businesses like Amazon, and Wal-Mart that might want to use online advertising. Such businesses can have an inventory of tens of thousands to millions of products or services (hereafter referred to in the specification as “products” without loss of generality) Because of the underlying efforts and money required, it is daunting for these types of businesses to manually create an advertisement, including an ad creative and a set of targeting keywords, for each of the products sold on their Websites. Consequently, businesses will often create a single advertisement or a small set of advertisements for their entire inventory. For example, an online book seller may create a general ad like “Cheap books for sale” and target it with general keywords like “books,” “online,” “cheap”, where the general ad is meant to serve the bookseller's entire inventory. Such an advertisement is not well-targeted for search phrases. For example, if a search engine user searches on phrases like “lord of the rings” or “dan brown,” the forgoing general advertisement above is not targeted to such popular book titles and authors—even though the bookseller may carry inventory related to these keywords. Even if a general ad creative is targeted to various products, it might not perform as well as a more specific ad creative.
As can be appreciated from the foregoing example, it would be very useful to help businesses, and especially business selling a large number of different products, to advertise online effectively, while allowing such businesses to avoid tedious and laborious ad creative authoring and targeting tasks.
So-called “templated ads” may be used to help advertisers create multiple, but similar, ads with minimal effort. Using templated ads technology, an advertiser supplies a template that contains certain variables as an ad creative. For ease of exposition assume that there is only one variable in the template. This variable is substituted by a keyword to form an instance of the template. Having created the template, the advertiser simply supplies a list of keywords to create multiple instances of this template. For example, a template may look like “Cheap deal on <<bookname>>” where <<bookname>> is a variable that can take any book name. However, templated ads may not generate good quality ads for every product in the inventory. Moreover, they do not solve the problem of generating targeting keywords for the ads.
As can be appreciated, better techniques for helping businesses to advertise online effectively, while allowing such businesses to avoid tedious and laborious ad creative authoring and targeting tasks, would be useful.